Many growers do not apply starter fertilizer, insecticide, or other beneficial agricultural treatments at the time of planting because the amount of additional transportation, handling, and labor required for such application.
Applying active ingredients to a large field requires the transport of large volumes of water. The water is commonly carried on a tractor, which has a limited capacity. Additionally, in some regions water in large quantities is unavailable. Many agricultural actives are applied to crops or soil as sprays. The active ingredient is typically added to a tank and mixed with a diluent such as water before being sprayed on the field or crop. The active ingredient may be in one of many known formulation types, for example, an emulsion concentrate, an emulsifiable solution, a microencapsulate, or a suspension concentrate. After dilution, using currently-known formulations and techniques, a typical application rate is approximately 9 gallons/acre. Application to 500 acres at a typical rate thus requires 4500 gallons of liquid. A tractor carrying a full load of seeds or other plant-generative material cannot accommodate such a high volume of liquid, so fertilizer, insecticide, or other treatment at time of planting requires multiple trips to refill the tractor's tanks.
Rather than make these trips, most growers prefer to load seed once and plant uninterrupted. Although this saves valuable planting time, it would be beneficial if a grower could load both seed and fertilizer, insecticide, or other beneficial treatments once and plant interrupted while applying a planting-time treatment.
Thus the field of agriculture is in need of new techniques and for formulating and applying agricultural active ingredients such as insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and plant nutrients. In particular, advances are needed that can reduce the volume of agricultural formulation needed to treat a particular area of field. This includes advances increasing the efficacy of a given volume of an agricultural formulation, as well as advances that allow more precise delivery of an agricultural formulation to the area where it can be most effective. Such high-precision, ultra-low-volume application techniques allow greater areas to be covered while using lower amounts of active ingredient and lower volumes of water. This results in greater resource efficiency, as well as time savings for the grower efficiency. Such techniques also reduce the amount of active ingredient applied to areas where such application may be either wasteful or actively harmful.